My Location

Jan 18, 2010

iPhone annoyances

There's a lot to like about the Apple iPhone, but just as much to dislike. Here are my top iPhone annoyances:

11. No AM/FM radio. Of course internet radio is great but in Australia we pay through the nose for bandwidth.

10. No FM transmitter. Some of us have old cars (like 8 years old) with no auxiliary audio inputs or Bluetooth.

9. No camera on the front, so no two-way video calls.

8. The camera is crap. OK, so probably all phone cameras are.

7. USB cables cost $30! Come on! It's a short piece of wire between two plugs!

6. You can't sort by rating in the App Store, which means you can't easily find the "cream of the crop" applications -- those which people really like.

5. You can't use the device as a 3G WiFi router (or MiFi as people are calling them these days).

4. Battery life stinks. OK, so because you can do so much with the iPhone, you do use it a lot. But when one charge doesn't even last 24 hours, things are grim.

3. Complexity of programming. Microsoft's developer tools are streets ahead. When I hop into Objective-C I feel like I'm in a twenty-year time warp.

2. No access to the file system. It won't function as a mass storage device, so getting photos off it is a pain, and you can't use it to port random files around.

1. Applications can only be installed from the official App Store, and they have to be approved by Apple first. We paid for the device, we should therefore be free to install any software we like onto it.